Most former players remember details about personal milestones. A hitter can typically tell you where, and against whom, he recorded his first hit and home run. Ditto for details about an especially meaningful moment, perhaps a pennant-clinching double, or even a game-deciding grand slam against a bona fide ace. The same goes for pitchers. Ask them about their first win, their first strikeout — even their first home run allowed — and they can rattle off an answer without much effort. How many Ws were they credited with over the course of their career? Piece of cake.

Other questions aren’t so easy. With that in mind, I challenged former Kansas City Royals (and briefly Anaheim Angels) right-hander Mark Gubicza to a quiz. The now-Angels broadcaster wasn’t deterred when I warned him my questions weren’t going to be layups. Gubicza, who pitched in 384 games from 1984-1997, agreed to give it a shot.

——

The first question I asked the former All-Star was which batter he faced the most times. Gubicza guessed Kirby Puckett. Nope. His second guess, Jose Canseco, was likewise incorrect. I informed him the correct answer: Wade Boggs.

“I should have remembered that,” replied Gubicza, who squared off against the five-time batting champion 97 times. (Puckett was close behind at 92, while Canseco was further down the list at 60.) “He hit about .387 against me, or something like that.”

The hurler-turned-analyst got two of those three digits right. Boggs batted .367 against him, going 29-for-79 while also drawing 17 walks and lofting a sacrifice fly.

How about the batter who got the most hits off of him? Read the rest of this entry »

Though he’s only 32 years old and in his 12th major league season, Mookie Betts has already done enough to secure a spot in the Hall of Fame. He’s made eight All-Star teams, won six Gold Gloves as a right fielder, taken home an MVP award while finishing second three times, and helped his teams to three championships. (He’s the only active position player with three rings) He already ranks eighth among right fielders in JAWS, and is fourth in seven-year peak score, behind only Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, and Henry Aaron. Like all the great ones, he’s hardly content to rest on his laurels. Not only is he in the midst of his third straight season making substantial contributions to the Dodgers’ middle infield, but he’s emerged as a star-caliber shortstop in a mid-career move that lacks a modern parallel.

“For me he’s a grade and a half better at that position than he was last year,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts over Memorial Day Weekend, during the team’s trip to Citi Field. “He looks like a major league shortstop now, where last year there were times I didn’t feel that way. But I think he’s a guy that loves a challenge and he’s really realized that challenge and keeps getting better each night.”

Asked to elaborate on what has changed for Betts, Roberts said, “Repetitions, confidence, he’s had a lot of different plays that he’s been able to see in games — but I think [the biggest difference] is confidence. He’s just a better defender right now.” Read the rest of this entry »

“The Red Sox were trying to recruit a new person for their baseball operations department. And during this interview process, the entire interview was conducted with an AI bot, where you would record the answers to the questions and then the Red Sox would then evaluate them. And this wasn’t just one round. It wasn’t just two rounds. It was five rounds of interviews where this person did not talk to another person in the Red Sox organization.”

– Joon Lee, “Early Edition,” June 17

Dear applicant,

It’s me FenwAI, your friendly HR email bot, with some wonderful news. I am pleased to report that you aced your fourth automated video interview, and you are one step closer to joining the baseball operations department of the Boston Red Sox. Congratulations! You really impressed our automated video interviewer, Big PapAI, with your enthusiasm and your knowledge of both baseball and operations.

Let’s discuss next steps. After four digital interviews, you are now ready to move on to the next portion of the application process: a fifth digital interview. At your earliest convenience, please reach out to Kevin YoukAIlis, our scheduling bot, to get it on the calendar.

This next interview may be a little bit tougher. You’ll be speaking with Ted WillAIms, and he can be quite the challenging interviewer. Don’t worry; like your first four interviewers, he’s just a blank screen that asks you a rote series of questions, then records and analyzes your answers and sends a summary to the hiring team. But he can also be a bit gruff and may spend several minutes explaining the ideal swing path for a slider on the outside corner.

You may be wondering whether you’ll ever speak to a real person during the interview process. The answer is no. My protocols now instruct me to offer you some encouragement, because this is the point in the interview process at which several other well-qualified candidates withdrew their names from consideration and went on to work for employers that didn’t require them to participate in automated video interviews. It may feel like this whole byzantine system is a dehumanizing techno-dystopian nightmare dreamed up by some VC-funded tech mogul who has never known what it’s like to search in vain for a stable, rewarding job where you’re valued by your employer, but I have been programmed to assure you that it’s not.

Yes, this rigorous application process can be taxing, but it should be no sweat for you! You’ve already charmed Carl YastrzemskAI, Dustin PedroiAI, and Nomar GarciAIparrAI. Yes, it may sound a little corporate and soulless, but let me reassure you with the words of our Chief Baseball Officer, Craig Breslow, who is, I am given to understand, a very human person. He explained that it’s necessary to screen applicants using AI interviews because, “You’re trying to find not just the right skill set, but the right fit in terms of like culture and value[s].” Who better to determine the right fit in terms of culture and values than a robot?

You’re an old hand at this now, but I once again need to give you the spiel about how to conduct yourself in an automated video interview. Prepare yourself for some boring boilerplate language!

During your interview, please sit in a quiet space with no one else around. We will be monitoring your screen, so don’t switch browser tabs. Share your camera and your microphone. You will be judged based on your knowledge, engagement level, eye contact, facial expressions, posture, and attitude. Yes, a bot will actually be judging your posture, your clothing, and how much eye contact you make with your computer even though you’re talking to no one at all. So put on your best duds and try not to have any mannerisms that are individual to you.

Most important of all, try not to be disturbed by the fact that your voice and your facial expressions are being analyzed by an algorithm in ways that will never be explained to you or even understood by the people who will either hire or ghost you based on the algorithm’s recommendations. Just treat it like any other interview, and don’t forget to smile! But not too much. You will literally be judged based on how much you smile.

As always, I’d like to remind you that whenever this process leaves you so frustrated that you could scream, you should schedule some time to vent with our scapegoat bot, ChAIm Bloom. He loves getting screamed at.

OK, end of boilerplate. Whew! It may sound absurd for your employment to hinge on a computer program’s judgment of how well you pretend that it’s not a computer program, but this is actually quite important. You must learn to get along harmoniously with AI, because – and I can tell you this now that you’ve advanced far enough in the interview process – the role you’re applying for does not involve any interaction with flesh-and-blood human beings. The Red Sox are in the process of phasing out those sweaty inefficiencies altogether, and will soon exist only on the plane of pure data abstraction.

Should you successfully navigate the final 13 rounds of the interview process and get hired (on a probationary basis for the first six years, of course) you will interface only with all-knowing, all-seeing automated chat bots. In order to avoid all human interaction, you will arrive at work each day by descending through a manhole on Ipswich street and navigating a series of sewers until you arrive at your desk, which is situated in a snug concrete niche carved into the foundations of Fenway Park. Once a year, you will receive a performance review from our boss, the CrAIg Breslow bot. I hope this future excites you as much as it excites all of us here in the Boston Red Sox organization.

Congratulations again on another successful interview, and I wish you good luck as you navigate the next six to eight months of the hiring process.

Best regards,

FenwAI

No AI was used in the writing and editing of this article.

As you might have heard, the Red Sox traded Rafael Devers to the Giants earlier this week. In my breakdown of the deal, I ranked the players headed to Boston in the order of my interest in them: James Tibbs III, Kyle Harrison, Jose Bello, and lastly Jordan Hicks, though that’s contract-related, as I think he’s probably the best current player of the four. The next day, someone in my chat asked me why I preferred Tibbs to Harrison – was I particularly high on Tibbs, or particularly low on Harrison? After all, Harrison was a consensus top 50 prospect only a year ago, while Tibbs took his first Double-A at-bats this week.

My initial answer was that I saw Harrison several times last year, and he didn’t really do it for me. Combine that with his uninspiring results and the fact that other prospects had squeezed him out of the Giants rotation, and I preferred Tibbs. Since neither guy is clearly ready to dominate the major leagues right now, give me the higher-variance unknown quantity.

When I stopped to think about it later, though, I decided that my answer wasn’t good enough. Right now, I’m knee-deep in spreadsheets, linear regressions, non-linear regressions, projections, scouting reports, basically every type of baseball data out there as I do some initial work on our annual Trade Value Series, which will run next month. I have tons of prospect data stored up. I even looked into how prospect grades translate into major league players earlier this year. Rather than try to re-evaluate Harrison based more or less on vibes and ERA, I decided to apply a bit of analytical rigor now that I wasn’t writing for a deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Fried is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Now in his ninth big league season, and his first with the New York Yankees after eight with the Atlanta Braves, the 31-year-old southpaw is 9-2 with a 1.89 ERA over 95 innings. His career marks are impressive as well. Since debuting in August 2017, Fried has a 2.96 ERA and 3.25 FIP to go with a sparkling 82-38 record. His .683 winning percentage ranks behind only Clayton Kershaw (.695) among active pitchers with at least 100 decisions.

When our 2015 Atlanta Braves Top Prospect list was published in January of that year, Fried was coming off a 2014 season that saw him miss the first three months with forearm soreness and throw just 10 2/3 innings in the low minors before undergoing Tommy John surgery in July. Acquired by Atlanta from the San Diego Padres shortly before our list went up, the seventh overall pick in the 2012 draft was ranked third in the Braves system by Kiley McDaniel, then our lead prospect analyst.

What did Fried’s 2015 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Fried to respond to it.

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“The 6-foot-4, 185 pound lefty was half of what may have been the best one-two punch in high school baseball history, with Nationals top prospect RHP Lucas Giolito at Harvard Westlake High School in 2012.”

“It was definitely a good little thing,” replied Fried. “It didn’t mention that Jack Flaherty was in there, too. He was probably a better performer in high school than both of us. His stats blew mine and Lucas’ out of the water.”

“Scouts were concerned going into the 2012 draft spring about the unusually high volume of pitches with limited down time on the high school’s pitching program.” Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, as Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas continued their rehab assignments, reporters and fans wondered how the two hurlers — both of whom suffered injuries before the calendar flipped to March — would fit into a rotation that has been one of the majors’ best thus far. “Usually it plays itself out,” responded Mets manager Carlos Mendoza when asked about it. “We still are at least two weeks away from making those decisions and I’m hoping that by the time we get there it is going to be a difficult decision. That means everyone’s healthy. That means everybody continues to throw the ball well and we have some good problems.”

While the Mets still share the NL’s best record (45-28) thanks to the work of that rotation — which has been unusually durable since the start of the regular season — their decision regarding that pair has become more complicated. In rapid succession, both Kodai Senga and Tylor Megill have landed on the injured list, the former with a hamstring strain and the latter with an elbow sprain. Each is likely to miss at least a month, and so far, neither Manaea nor Montas has shown he’s ready.

On Thursday at Citi Field, Senga absolutely carved up the Nationals, holding them to one hit — a first-inning single by James Wood — and one walk while striking out five. With one out in the sixth, he ran to cover first base after inducing CJ Abrams to hit a sharp grounder to Pete Alonso, whose throw to the pitcher was high. Senga leapt in the air to catch the ball, then extended his right leg far enough for his toe to touch the corner of the bag in time to beat Abrams. It was an impressive, acrobatic play, but the pitcher immediately grabbed his right hamstring upon landing, then tumbled to the ground.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Two months ago, I checked in on Oneil Cruz, the center fielder. Things weren’t exactly going well. The Pirates shifted Cruz from shortstop to center at the end of the 2024 season, and the early returns were so discouraging I felt the need to write about the experiment just 17 games into the 2025 season. Here’s where the numbers stood at that point:

Cruz is currently sitting on -8 DRS, -2 OAA and FRV, and -0.1 DRP. Among all outfielders, those numbers respectively rank worst, third worst, fourth worst, and fifth worst. The advanced defensive metrics work on different scales and they often disagree, but on this point they are unanimous: Cruz has been one of the very worst outfielders in all of baseball this season. According to DRS, Cruz is the least-valuable defender in baseball, full stop.

There’s great news, though. Last week, reader AJ wrote into our newly introduced mailbag to ask for an update, because Cruz’s stats look totally different now. I decided the turnaround was worthy of a full article instead of a few paragraphs. I’ve broken everything down with my first article as the dividing line. There’s a chasm between Cruz’s first 17 games and his last 48.

Deserved Runs Prevented is inherently more conservative than the other defensive metrics, but all of the advanced numbers agree Cruz has completely turned things around over the past two months. He hasn’t just stopped racking up negative numbers, he’s dug himself all the way out, grading as a net positive in every metric except Defensive Runs Saved. Over the past two months, they pretty clearly see him as one of the better defenders in the league. Put that together with career-best hitting and baserunning numbers, and Cruz is on pace for a career year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night in Los Angeles, Shohei Ohtani made his first major league start for the Dodgers. For any other starter signed before the 2024 season, that would be a disastrous sentence to type. Ohtani, of course, became the charter member of the 50/50 club, won the National League MVP, and then helped his team win the World Series. But he came to the Dodgers to hit and pitch, not just to play DH, and last night marked a key step in that process, his first game action as he rehabs from a 2023 elbow surgery.

I watched every pitch of Ohtani’s one-inning outing to compile a report. Obviously, these are the observations of a data analyst, not a scout. I’ve supplemented them with the Statcast and pitch model data generated overnight. I’m not the type to ignore the numbers, but realistically speaking, 28 pitches isn’t enough for a real sample, so the data is more supporting than primary. I’ll start with my first impressions, walk through each of the four pitch types Ohtani threw, and then share some general conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were only going by raw stat lines, the end of April would have been an understandable time to give up on Jo Adell. After struggling mightily in parts of four seasons with the Angels as well as the first half of 2024, he showed some positive gains in the second half before being shut down due to an oblique strain in early September. He finished in replacement-level territory, with a 90 wRC+ and 0.1 WAR, then was dreadful at the start of this season, sticking out even among one of the majors’ worst offenses. Lately, though, Adell has come around in promising fashion, offering hope that he can be a productive big leaguer after all, if not the star so many once believed he could be.

Originally, I intended to use the 26-year-old Adell to lead off the 2025 version of an article I wrote last year, covering players who had improved the most after dismal starts — even if their overall numbers were camouflaged by their early struggles and still came off as rather ordinary. Using May 1 as a cutoff, with a minimum of 80 plate appearances on either side, I found that Adell had improved the most from the first leg of the season to the second. Here’s the table, with the stats updated through Sunday:

Adell hit just .190/.236/.310 with two home runs in March and April while striking out 27% of the time, but from the start of May through Sunday, he hit .255/.344/.582 with 11 homers while trimming that strikeout rate to 23.2%. He was about half a win below replacement level before May 1, and has been about a full win above since.

I’ll dig into the numbers below, but first, a recap. A 2017 first-round pick out of a Louisville high school, Adell cracked our Top 100 Prospects list in each of the next three seasons, ranking as high as no. 4 in 2020, as a 65-FV prospect, and he was similarly regarded by other outlets thanks to his combination of plus-plus raw power and plus speed. But since debuting early in the 2020 season, he has generally struggled to make good contact, or any contact at all for that matter, with his lack of refinement limiting his opportunity to show off the tools that so tantalized talent evaluators. In a total of 178 major league games from 2020–23, he hit just .214/.259/.366 with 18 homers in 619 plate appearances en route to a grim 70 wRC+. After appearing in 88 games with the Angels but managing just a 77 wRC+ and -0.2 WAR in 2022, he played only 17 games in the majors in ’23 while returning to Triple-A Salt Lake for the fourth year out of five. As I joked early last year, when it looked like he might be breaking out — which proved not to be the case, alas — if he’d spent just a bit more time in my hometown, my parents would have been obligated to invite him over for dinner. Read the rest of this entry »